CamJam Edukit 3 robotics kit is launched today. It’s an entry-level robotics kit aimed at beginners, but I’ve had quite a lot of fun with it, and haven’t even used all the bits yet. It’s been put together by Jamie Mann from the PiHut, and Mike Horne and Tim Richardson from CamJam. As with other CamJam Edukits, there is a progressive series of worksheets to help guide you through how to make the various pieces do what they’re designed for. You can find those here. Here’s what the kit looks like straight out of the […more…]

Today the CamJam Edukit 2 is being launched at the first Cambridge Raspberry Jam PiWars event. I’ll be judging the smallest robot and the best non-competing robot categories at PiWars, but today’s blog is about the kit. This is the second kit in the series, which adds some sensors (temperature, light and PIR) into the bundle. The full kit contents is shown and described below. What’s in the Kit? A 400 point bread board including dual power rails Immersable DS18B20 temperature sensor Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) Passive InfraRed (PIR) sensor Piezo buzzer 4 male-male blue […more…]

Jamie from the Pi Hut sent me a FLIRC controller for review. What is it? It’s a USB dongle that can be programmed to receive signals from pretty much any infra-red remote control that you may have lying around. And you can then use this to control your Raspberry Pi based* media centre (XBMC, OpenELEC, RaspBMC). Simple Setup Programming the remote controller needs another computer. But once programmmed, FLIRC works perfectly with the Pi. It can’t currently be programmed on the Pi itself, but there are setup utilities for Windows, Linux (x86) and Mac. So, […more…]